Author Name: Fairness and Accuracy in Media.
(C) Fairness and Accuracy in Media - FAIR.
This unaltered story originally appeared on FAIR.org[1][2]
As US Teeters on Authoritarianism, WaPo Pushes ‘Both Sides’ Fantasies
Date: 2020-10-01 18:37:19+00:00
By ['Dorothee Benz']
“US Political Divide Becomes Increasingly Violent, Rattling Activists and Police,” a Washington Post headline (8/27/20) declared. My high school English teacher would have taken a red pen to that title, pointing out that divides cannot be violent, only people can. People on both sides of a divide are becoming violent, is what the Post meant. And that is the real problem with this headline, and the 2,800 words that follow.
False equivalences are among the biggest distortions that plague corporate journalism, as FAIR has documented over and over. Especially in an era when lying has been adopted as a key political strategy by the president and many others on the political right, coverage of “both sides” of an issue without plainly separating facts from fiction actively undermines democratic discourse, and the informed citizenry on which it depends.
People at the Washington Post are aware of the crucial role the media play in making democracy possible. So aware, in fact, that they introduced the paper’s first slogan in its history—“Democracy Dies in Darkness”—a month after President Donald Trump took office. It’s hard not to assume the timing was an indication of the Post’s expectation that a vigilant press would be especially necessary in a Trump presidency.
And yet.
The first four paragraphs of the piece describe an armed right-wing attack on a voter registration rally sponsored by a Democratic congressional candidate in Tyler, Texas (an attack the Post and most other national outlets didn’t bother to cover when it happened several weeks earlier—FAIR.org, 8/11/20). Hundreds of armed people descended on the peaceful crowd, yelling obscenities and physically assaulting them. But this is where the accurate reporting ends.
The next sentence refers to this scene as “scuffling.” The term both downplays the level of violence and intimidation involved in the attack, and vaguely intimates that both sides contributed to it. This trend continues throughout the article, referring to “a spate of exchanges” and a “series of disturbances” to describe a pattern of right-wing political violence directed at protests against police brutality.
The article claims, without citation or qualification, that “people on both sides…have been filmed exchanging punches, beating one another with sticks and flagpoles, or standing face-to-face with weapons.” The article cites two specific incidents of left-wing menace: one where a group of protesters harassed restaurant goers for not raising their fists in solidarity with Black Lives Matter (an incident the Post admits was nonviolent), and the case of a driver who was beaten by protesters after crashing his truck.
In contrast to this single assault, the article documents eight recent right-wing assaults on protestors, in addition to the one in Tyler—six of them involving gunshots aimed at protesters, resulting in multiple injuries and four fatalities.
In other words, the article’s factual content does not support its framing of escalating clashes between left-wing and right-wing protesters. Rather, it reveals an alarming increase in armed right-wing attacks on peaceful left-wing protesters, usually racial justice protesters. It is a pattern of intimidation and violence, one that is instantly recognizable to any student of 20th century history. Across the globe, privatized violence aimed at popular democratic demands is a hallmark of right-wing authoritarianism. The failure to name—and, worse, to try to obscure through misleading comparisons—what is plainly a threat to US democracy is a dereliction of journalistic duty.
This article’s sins don’t end there, alas. It manages to talk about these various armed attacks on people protesting police violence throughout the country without ever using the words “racism,” “racist” or “white supremacy.” Instead, we have “politically tinged” violence, “political and cultural debates” and, my favorite, “this year’s bitter political divisions”—as though 500 years of colonialism and white supremacy have nothing to do with 2020’s lethal toll on Black lives.
Trump, who has refused to condemn right-wing violence, has also said he plans to send armed sheriffs to polling places for the November election. That’s not in his legal authority to do, but that fact is completely besides the point. The point is that he is adding to the threats of voter intimidation at the polls, all while claiming widespread voter fraud and refusing to say he’ll accept the election results.
The United States is teetering on the brink of full-scale, white supremacist–fueled authoritarianism. In this context, it’s unfathomable that one of the nation’s leading papers could write a piece about right-wing paramilitary violence and reduce it to “scuffling” without any larger meaning or effect.
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